Women in abusive marriages have been abandoned overseas. Advocates bring problem to light.
Advocates for survivors of domestic violence in Wisconsin are calling attention to a concerning phenomenon of American men who abandon their wives in foreign countries.
Wisconsin groups believe they are at the forefront of advocating and educating on the little-known legal issue, called transnational marriage abandonment, which traps immigrant women in their home countries with little recourse to return to the U.S.
The Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition has worked with several women abandoned abroad whose husbands have returned to the U.S. to claim all the couple’s assets and full custody of their children.
A person’s immigration status can leave them especially vulnerable to abuse – a long-known problem. But the magnitude of this issue, abandoning women overseas, is unclear because it is rarely identified and tracked.
If more people knew about the issue and the hallmarks of each case, then advocates and lawyers could better help survivors, said Kelsey Mullins, an attorney with End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin who has been working with the Women’s Coalition.
“We might be able to gain more momentum in empowering and protecting these survivors if we could show how common it is,” Mullins said.
Cases typically begin with abusive marriage in U.S.
One tricky case jumpstarted the effort to raise awareness.
In 2021, Mullins got a call from Basema Yasin, coordinator of Our Peaceful Home, a culturally specific domestic violence support program within the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition.
Yasin was seeking Mullins’ advice on how to help a woman who had been abandoned in her home country. She needed help returning to the U.S. – and help getting custody of her children.
“I was pretty surprised by all of the legal issues that were coming up peripherally from this, because it wasn't going to be as easy as buying a ticket back to the U.S.,” Mullins said.
Mullins had never heard of a case like it. But as they talked, Yasin told Mullins about other similar cases she’d come across in recent years. Mullins, who provides legal assistance to survivor advocates in Wisconsin, since has worked on more than a half-dozen cases and is sure there are many more.
Digging into the cases, Mullins and Women's Coalition advocates found that transnational marriage abandonment tends to follow a pattern of abuse and control.
In a typical case, the husband is American but has cultural ties to another country. His new wife is from that country and may hope to make a better life for herself in the U.S.
The woman may feel she must tolerate her abusive marriage, said Janan Najeeb, Women's Coalition president. If she were to return to her home country, where her family is struggling to make ends meet, she would feel like “a burden,” Najeeb said.
The husband may isolate the woman from the outside world. If she lacks English skills, a driver’s license, a social community or a cellphone, she may feel she has less ability to leave the marriage.
He may also use her immigration status to threaten her: “You do this, or I’m not going to apply (for a green card) for you,” for example, Najeeb said. “‘You do this, or I’m going to send you overseas.”
The husband's abuse escalates to the point he abandons the woman in her home country. His goal often is to strip her of her share of the assets, and often her children.
In most cases, the woman does not know she is going to be left in her home country.
In an anonymized sample case Mullins wrote about for the State Bar of Wisconsin website, the husband apologized for his past abuse, booked the family a flight to the country and framed it as a chance to visit family. At the airport, the woman’s family picked her up, and her husband took their child and boarded a flight back to the U.S.
Because of how isolated she’d been, it’s likely that few people knew of the abuse the woman was suffering while in the U.S.
Women abandoned abroad face barriers to returning to U.S.
The Women’s Coalition advocates worry that by the time a woman is abandoned overseas, it is too late for friends and family to help, since returning to the U.S. is often an insurmountable challenge.
An abusive husband might have lied, telling his wife she had a green card or American citizenship when she didn’t, or taken passports or other important documents she'd need to get legal residency.
Plus, in some war-torn countries, U.S. embassies are closed, leaving no way to file paperwork. And for a woman who has been cut off financially, buying a plane ticket and hiring a lawyer can be prohibitively expensive.
While the woman is unable to return, her husband begins divorce proceedings independently.
“We kind of realized that these survivors were in maybe the most marginalized position of most of the survivors that we work with, because they can't even access the resources that we have here in Wisconsin when they're abroad,” Mullins said.
Mullins and the Women’s Coalition advocates emphasize that the abuse is not exclusive to people with ties to predominantly Muslim countries. They have heard of cases with the same hallmarks from a range of places, from India to Africa to Mexico, and from people of other faith backgrounds.
The common thread is that the women are immigrants.
“Any abuser is going to use the tactics with his means to control the woman,” Yasin said. “Immigration status is one of the most powerful tools they have.”
Research shows that immigrant women are particularly vulnerable to domestic violence, experiencing abuse at two times the rate of the general U.S. population. It climbs to three times the rate of the general population when a U.S. citizen is married to an immigrant woman.
Lack of support, understanding for survivors
More awareness about the issue is sorely needed in the justice system and the broader community, the advocates said.
While the women abandoned abroad are often from poor families and have little power in the marriage, the American husbands tend to be well-connected, Najeeb said.
Respected male community leaders may not know the full extent of the abuse, and side with the abuser before and after the abandonment. Seeing that someone “got away with it,” and was enabled by other men, is toxic for a tight-knit community, she said.
Other women in abusive situations take note of the woman abandoned abroad, separated from her children.
They may think, “well, I'm going to stay quiet, because at least I'm with my children, and I'll take the abuse,” Yasin said.
The U.S. court system is another stumbling block for women abandoned abroad.
When the abusive husband returns to the U.S. and files for divorce, he often tells a judge that his wife was the one who abandoned the family, the advocates said.
Under that pretense, the husband will say he needs full custody of the children and all the assets in the marriage. He may say that he could not reach his wife to serve her notice of the divorce.
“The divorce basically proceeds without that spouse's input whatsoever,” Mullins said.
Advocates from the Women’s Coalition have been frustrated with how Wisconsin courts have handled some of the cases involving transnational abandonment.
In one case, it took considerable time for a woman abandoned abroad to earn enough money to return to the U.S. and go to court for custody of her children. A skeptical court official charged that she’d built a new life overseas.
It demonstrated a lack of understanding of the barriers abandoned women face, the advocates said, like low daily wages, stolen passports and closed embassies.
“We’re really a lot of times hitting our heads against the wall, because the court system still does not recognize it,” Najeeb said.
In her legal research, Mullins found very little in U.S. publications about similar cases. It's possible, she said, that other advocates are dealing with the issue but don't realize how widespread it is. So she began speaking publicly about it.
“We thought, maybe it isn’t enough to help individual survivors,” Mullins said. “We want to do that. And also, we want to make sure that advocates can spot these issues.”
Abandonment should be recognized as a form of domestic abuse and a crime in its own right, Mullins and the Women’s Coalition advocates said.
Mullins knows that a judge might be likely at first glance to side with the husband, who typically is a respected community member who has been raising his children in the U.S. while his wife is stuck abroad. But if judges saw transnational abandonment as part of a pattern of domestic abuse and control, they could be more likely to believe the woman, Mullins said.
Kevin Martens, the presiding Family Court judge for Milwaukee County Circuit Court, said he had never heard of the phenomenon before a Journal Sentinel reporter asked about it and had not seen any cases of transnational abandonment since moving to his current position in August. Mullins' article on the State Bar's website was enlightening, he said, and he was considering sending it to his colleagues.
Martens said it's a reminder to scrutinize the proof offered by a spouse who says the other spouse cannot be located in a divorce case. He said guardians ad litem — who represent children in a custody case — might "help ferret out cases like these" by asking additional questions of the children, and that Zoom hearings could be a good tool for women who can't travel to the U.S.
Mullins and Yasin are working to teach people like judges, lawyers and domestic violence survivor advocates about the issue.
The goal is to expand training to teachers, religious leaders and social workers – anyone who might notice when a doting mother suddenly disappears, or when something isn’t right at home.
Mullins also wants to create a database for advocates to track the issue nationally.
Some options available for survivors, but few success stories so far
Immigration law offers some pathways for women in these situations, Mullins said. A legal petition using the 1994 Violence Against Women Act is one promising option because the petitioner doesn’t have to be in the U.S. to file it.
Other paths require the woman to have reported their abuse as a crime while living in the U.S., to prove severe human trafficking and to be present in the U.S. currently – all not ideal for the cases local advocates have seen.
For a while, Mullins' research on abandonment cases didn't turn up any success stories.
Then, this fall, a court in the United Kingdom sided with a survivor of transnational marriage abandonment and allowed her to return to the country.
“I thought, wow, they did it, they educated that court official, and now this is precedent. This is going to help so many people,” Mullins said.
It inspired her to persevere in her own efforts.
“If we can show that this is a problem, and that this is affecting so many people, then maybe we can start to seek this type of system-change as well,” Mullins said.
Where to find help
The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800-799-7233.